CA APM Review

Our development cycle has improved as far as the turnaround time on fixes and improvements

What is our primary use case?

We are a solutions provider. Obviously, depending on the customer, we are monitoring applications.

We have deployed to several customers and they have all found benefit in seeing how the application is performing, what components are performing worse, and where they can improve. DevOps is definitely a big play for us.

They are seeing that benefit to having the APM product instrumenting their applications and getting that insight before it goes to production. It is working well.

How has it helped my organization?

Our development cycle has definitely improved as far as the turnaround time on fixes and improvements. The solution that gets put out is definitely better because of it.

What is most valuable?

The ability to see which component is problematic.

If they are meeting SLAs before it gets to production impacting customers.

What needs improvement?

I know they are working on a more dynamic agent that will be able to evaluate the application and instrument based on what it is finding. I think that is fantastic.

Getting that agent deployment simplified would be an amazing thing. The upcoming changes for the deployment process of the agent will help a lot, in that others have gotten to that point first.

For how long have I used the solution?

Three to five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It is stable. There are enhancements that we have to make sometimes that are not necessarily easy to implement depending on the customer and the situation. For the most part, it is a definitely a solid product and every customer definitely sees the benefit in using it.

One of the biggest challenges was trying to gauge overhead of a particular customer, and that was difficult to do. I know they are making improvements to the product to help address that type of situation. However, we are still in play there. There is benefit to it, but it was just difficult to prove that it was not the agent. With any situation like this, it is not uncommon to have your development team look at monitoring as a potential roadblock. Ultimately, I think we are low overhead and providing value to the development cycle.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I think other products do have a little bit more flexibility in how large they can scale. For the most part, I think every customer I have observed has been able to work with the product. Either way, we have options to scale. It is just whether it is one cluster versus a couple of clusters, and they get what they need.

How is customer service and technical support?

Technical support is good. They are responsive, and always willing to help you. The turnaround time just depends on the issue, which is understandable. They have always been responsive with great people.

Which solutions did we use previously?

Where I started with the company, we were seeing outages daily. No one could really track what the problem was at the time.

Since implementing this solution and having that information, the data to work off of definitely reduced that to basically nothing. It is custom code, so it is definitely a little difficult compared to some others, but it definitely helped us. For the most part, we run constantly without any issue at this point because of APM.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is pretty easy; nothing complex.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Not necessarily. Since then, we have evaluated others and they all have their strong suits. APM still tends to do a more thorough job where others may have simplified the deployment process.

CA APM still has a strong place in the market.

What other advice do I have?

You need to really evaluate the data that you are getting and what is important to you. Where one product may do a really good job in providing visualizations and that sort of thing, are you really getting the level of depth that you need from your product? Just take the time to evaluate the quality of the data you are getting.

I like to see the vendor who is committed to your success, primarily. That they have a solid product, which I think, for the most part, most do. Also, they understand that the need to stay with you throughout the process to make sure you are supported. I think CA has always done a good job with this.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner.